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Friday, 23 December 2016

Procurement people like to move around, and it’s not uncommon for a department to get a new CPO every 2-3 years. A new CPO has a large task ahead of them. Usually, their goal is to make savings in the department and provide better value for the company. Where do you start?

It’s a daunting task. If you’re lucky, you’ll have category managers who have done their spend analysis and will give you some data to start with. If you’re not, your first task is going to be asking your new team to go away and come back with an idea of where your current spend is.

How do you go from this spend analysis to working out which areas you should hit for maximum effect?

Traditionally you could go to each of your category managers and ask them to make a judgement call on where their largest areas of addressable spend are and how much of a percentage saving they feel like they can make.

This is fraught with risk, however. Those in the industry for a long time and many a procurement consultant will be able to tell you that large spends aren’t always addressable. There’s also the problem of personal interpretation - one of your category managers could be inherently pessimistic and only suggest a 1% saving when actually 5% is possible. A naturally optimistic category head may tell you that 10% savings can be made when you’re actually at the market price already.

Having a way to centralise and interpret this data in an unbiased way is incredibly important. That’s why we created Category Dojo to help new CPOs and Heads of Procurement find the low hanging fruit and quick wins to fill their spend pipeline when they join a new company.

Category Dojo looks at a multitude of factors such as how important you are to a particular supplier and how important they are to you. It looks at when you last tendered a particular product and how the market has moved since then. It will give you advice on what to hit first and what to avoid because you’re already in a strong position.

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!

Tuesday, 20 December 2016

Christmas can be stressful at the best of times, and this year has been somewhat worse than others for Santa Claus, having experienced some major issues in his supply chain. The latest news coming so shortly after the elf strike has lead to many believing that Christmas might even be cancelled!

“In recent years, children are putting toys like flying drones and games consoles on their Christmas wishlists. Me and Mrs Claus simply can't cope! We were struggling even before the elves went on strike, but we simply got to a point where we didn't know what to do!"

However, Santa need not have worried. Having a long-standing relationship with Sourcing Solved (the experts in procurement recruitment and having close ties with the executive reindeer community) the team were brought in to solve some of Santa's supply chain issues.

Having wasted no time in analysing Santa's supply chain. Sourcing Solved admitted that changes needed to be made fast. New elves were brought in to decrease the dependency on those that were on strike with gnomes being promoted to oversee the production process.Relocation of production facilities from the North Pole to China would have been a strong possibility were it not for Santa implementing Market Dojo to run a reverse auction finding suppliers to produce some of the Christmas Toys at market price.

Market Dojo co-founder Alun Rafique explained “Being aware that it wasn’t long until Christmas, we pitched to Santa knowing that through using our eAuction tool he could find and compare reliable suppliers whilst purchasing at market value.”

For now, it appears that Santa is back on track and even looks set to finish ahead of schedule. “I'm confident that no child will be disappointed this year, I have more time on my hands to address the long-standing elf situation, and reach a decision that works for everyone”.

Without the assistance of Sourcing Solved, we might never have had a Christmas this year!

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!

Monday, 5 December 2016

It has been a little while since we released updates to Market Dojo, but that doesn’t mean the engineering team have been resting. In fact, they have been very busy working on new features and customer requested tweaks. Here is a run-down.

Lot templates for advanced lots

To complement the Questionnaire template feature we released earlier in the year, we have now added a Lot template feature as well. Lot templates allow administrators to setup best-practice templates that can quickly be added to a sourcing event. By creating a library of lot templates, companies using advanced lots can make their users more productive.

Users can quickly create advanced lots from templates.

Re-invite participants

We have improved the re-invite participants feature, to improve traceability of the invite process. This means that the Host is copied on any re-invite emails, in the case that a participant has not received the original.

When re-sending invites, the host is copied on the message.

Bulk download documents

Once an event has completed, you may wish to download all the documentation for the winning participants, or even for everyone who took part. This can now be accomplished with a single click, making it very easy to share the results with stakeholders or record the agreement in other systems.

Export questionnaire for participants

Over the course of 2016, we have made many improvements to our questionnaire engine, adding new question types, better support for editing, performance improvements, and much more. As a result, our customers are running more questionnaires on Market Dojo, and those questionnaires are more detailed. It is often necessary for our participants to collaborate with colleagues to provide the answers. They also need a record of what answers were given, which they can share. To make this easier, we have added a way of exporting the questionnaire into a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet contains details of the question; the expected answer format; and the answer if it has been provided. This will help make the process of answering questionnaires easier and more efficient for participants.

More field types for Advanced Lots

In addition to text and price fields, we have added a number field, date field and picklist field types to advanced lots. This is something our customers have requested, and it will help anyone who wants to restrict the type of answers that participants can provide. This is particularly beneficial if you are running a lot of similar events, and want to ensure data consistency for reporting purposes.

Award Lots - notify awarded participant

Once an auction or RFQ has been completed, it is necessary to record who won and notify them. This step often includes further evaluation and review before a final decision is made. However, some of our customers are running many events every day and wanted a more streamlined way of completing the process. For those people, we have added an extra step to our award lots dialogue. This means that once an event is completed, the decision can be recorded and the winner(s) informed in less than a minute. Here is how it works.

Supplier onboarding - Configurable timescales

One of the benefits of using SIM Dojo to onboard your suppliers is that the system will automatically track and remind suppliers, scorers and administrators of the deadlines. In the latest release, we have added the ability to customise the durations associated with each deadline.

Configuring the deadlines associated with a SIM Event.

If you have any ideas regarding features that you would like to see, please email your suggestions to info@marketdojo.com

Market Dojo helps procurement professionals negotiate better with our on-demand eSourcing tools. If you’d like to find out more, get in touch or register for free and play around with our software for yourself!